BRENT--This is my last warning. If you persist in your course you will be struck down by the Madagascar madness. Q.
Under his breath, Brent swore. Again he looked about the cavern, then turned hurriedly, picked up the motor, passed out the steel door, clanged it shut, and locked it.
No sooner had Brent shut the door, however, than it seemed as if the very face of the outer rocky wall of the cavern began to move--to tilt, as if on hinges.
If a human eye had been in the Graveyard of Genius at that instant it would have sworn that it perceived in the inky blackness of the tilting rock a passage, and in the shadows of that passage a huge, weird, grotesque figure peering in.
Then the tilting rock door closed again, as the figure disappeared down the rocky passage on the opposite side--a menace and a threat to the owner of Brent Rock, insecure even in his millions.
When Brent arrived back at the library he had quite recovered his poise, at least to the eyes of those in the library. Zita had joined Eva with the old inventor, Davis.
As Brent entered, Davis uttered an exclamation of joy at the sight of his motor. For the moment Brent almost glowed.
"Along with your invention," he beamed, as he handed the model to the old man, "I am going to release many others to the world."
All this not only Locke was noting, but Zita, too, appeared to be an almost too interested listener.
The others were chatting when Zita heard a noise in the hall and hurried out. She was just in time to see a rather hard-visaged man, with cruel, penetrating eyes. It was Herbert Balcom, vice-president of the company.
Zita whispered to him a moment and Balcom's hard face grew harder.
"Go up-stairs--watch _him_," he ordered, passing down the hall.
Balcom entered the library just as Davis was about to leave, hugging close to him his brain child. Davis clutched it a bit closer at sight of the other partner.
A glance would have been sufficient to show that Brent was secretly afraid of his partner, Balcom, and that Balcom dominated him.
"Go to the gate with him, my dear," whispered Brent to his daughter, who was clinging to his arm, convinced of the goodness of her father, ignorant of the very basis on which the Brent and Balcom fortune rested.